“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
It is being reported that John Podesta, Chairman of the defeated $1.2billion Clinton presidential campaign, is supporting the call by various officials, including at least forty Electors, that the members of the Electoral College be given a classified intelligence briefing on the alleged Russian hacking before the College votes on December 19.
In the event such a briefing comes to pass, it might be helpful if the Electors had some informed questions to ask the CIA.
1/ The DNC hackers inserted the name of the founder of Russian intelligence, in Russian, in the metadata of the hacked documents. Why would the G.R.U., Russian military intelligence do that?
2/ If the hackers were indeed part of Russian intelligence, why did they use a free Russian email account, or, in the hack of the state election systems, a Russian-owned server? Does Russian intelligence normally display such poor tradecraft?
3/ Why would Russian intelligence, for the purposes of hacking the election systems of Arizona and Illinois, book space on a Russian-owned server and then use only English, as documents furnished by Vladimir Fomenko, proprietor of Kings Servers, the company that owned the server in question, clearly indicate?
4/ Numerous reports ascribe the hacks to hacking groups known as APT 28 or “Fancy Bear” and APT 29 or “Cozy Bear.” But these groups had already been accused of nefarious actions on behalf of Russian intelligence prior to the hacks under discussion. Why would the Kremlin and its intelligence agencies select well-known groups to conduct a regime-change operation on the most powerful country on earth?
5/ It has been reported in the New York Times, without attribution, that U.S. intelligence has identified specific G.R.U. officials who directed the hacking. Is this true, and if so, please provide details (Witness should be sworn)
6/ The joint statement issued by the DNI and DHS on October 7 2016 confirmed that US intelligence had no evidence of official Russian involvement in the leak of hacked documents to Wikileaks, etc, saying only that the leaks were “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” Has the US acquired any evidence whatsoever since that time regarding Russian involvement in the leaks?
7/ Since the most effective initiative in tipping the election to Donald Trump was the intervention of FBI Director Comey, are you investigating any possible connections he might have to Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin?
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years. In addition to publishing numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis American Casino. His latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (Henry Holt). MEN ON STREET KRAKOW POLAND
I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it.
There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing
Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the
Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item
on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts
also.
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims.
The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the
USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers,
and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We
are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an
attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the
CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or
extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more
banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it
stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the
Russians” are beneath contempt.
As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians.
As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are
insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it
should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived
with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she
had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against
Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton
foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if
she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and
troubling people, then none of this would have happened. The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the
leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never
acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.
I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:
The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not
linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post
conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the
Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step
removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close
associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They
are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who
leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider.
It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers
to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would
have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not
been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge
whatsoever.”
But only three hours. While the article was not taken down,
the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous
one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming –
incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the
information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory,
that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my
obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they
arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who
those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the
KGB.
It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the
Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a
sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of
utter bullshit from the executive.
In the UK, one single article sums up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The
truly execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible
sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic
party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause
maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce
any evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a
journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth
their salt in considering the credibility of a source will first
consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they claim to have?
Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does
not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously.
Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the
source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do
have access. After access, you consider truthfulness.
Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10
years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has
released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I
have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.
Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access
do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest
idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them.
What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.
In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants.
But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous
with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means
“establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You
are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite
and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.
The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting
further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake
of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of
course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of
Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and
trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.
On December 19, 2016 the electoral college will vote.
Based on the vote, Trump should receive 306 votes and Clinton will have 232.
However, it is possible for many electors to change their vote. They aren't bound by it.
There's currently a very well funded attempt to influence electors to flip their votes on December 19th to change the outcome of the election.
Despite expectations that it is far fetched, it has a high chance of success. As of today, there are enough electoral votes in play to flip the outcome.
The three outcomes in discussion right now:
Trump falls short of the electoral count (270) to become President and the election is sent to Congress for a decision.
Clinton gets more than 270 electoral votes and becomes the President.
A dark horse candidate (Kaisitch, etc.) would get the votes to become President.
In my view: all of these outcomes would end in a disaster.
Why? Most of the country sees this election as already decided.
The voters have spoken. Any change the outcome of the election at this juncture would be widely seen as illegitimate.
What would happen next would be worse.
Trump would claim this is a coup d'etat and gather widespread support. Most of the states (which are Republican dominated) would support him on this.
Until January 20th, chaos would ensue. Violent conflict would be widespread as groups (pro or against Trump) form and take action.
I haven't fully gamed this out but I suspect Trump would be able to gather enough support to become President regardless of the electoral college result (anything less would result in a messy street level civil war). Fear of continued chaos would force this.
The moment he is sworn in, he would invoke a state of emergency and quickly move to arrest anyone connected with the plot to nullify the election and anyone calling for violence.
By the end of March, thousands of people would find themselves in Guantanamo. Labelled as terrorists/traitors they would be denied access to legal representation or any outside contact until the emergency is over.
Trump, strengthened by emergency powers and without an effective opposition (fear of being put on a list), would now be able to rule as a semi-dictator.
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) issued a joint statement Sunday with the incoming Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, and top Armed Services Committee Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island that Russian interference in the election "should alarm every American." They said Congress must investigate further without allowing it to become a partisan issue.
I think the Congress should investigate McCain's psychiatric records. We can certainly get a clear picture of McCain's judgment by his teaming up with the two "non-partisans", Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed. On another matter, how can anyone question Trump's choice for SOS when Obama selected Hillary Clinton and John Kerry? Care to guess on which Republicans voted to confirm Clinton and Kerry?
My first job out of the military was as an analyst on Soviet missile capabilities. All of us were young, ex-military, irreverent and by nature, skeptical.
We monitored every Soviet test launch from their three major bases in Plesetsk, Baikonur Tyuratam and Kapustin Yar. We both helped the the CIA and other defense agencies and they helped us. Plesetsk was so secret, no one even admitted it existed.
The reason we depended on the CIA was simple. Our technology was such that unlike conventional radar which sends out a signal and analyzes the return and is detectable, we analyzed external modulation of civil shortwave signals by exogenous events in the ionosphere.
WE were undetectable. (How about that? I was undetectable before I became a deplorable!)
We needed time to select the right signals and focus on specific areas. We did not want to waste a launch opportunity so we depended on the CIA and the NSA to supply us with intelligence of possible pre-launch activity.
Most raw intelligence data is extremely eclectic. It comes from subtle and unexpected places. We were as a group patriotic , irreverent and knew bullshit when we saw it.
The men and women in our intelligence agencies are good people.Washington politicians use the CIA, tell their lies and stories and use the agencies to confirm their bullshit.
(Remind me some day to tell you about Lyndon Johnson and how he blew our cover.)
When we reported an event (missile launch) we used a system called a "confidence factor".
Yesterday, I heard a "journalist" say the CIA had a high confidence that the Russians did the hacking.
I laughed and remembered discussions with our command center and my boss in Aviano trying to persuade me to call an event "high" because other sites were calling it "high". He reminded me that a "high confidence" call meant that you cannot rule its out. It is not a sure thing. (slam dunk to you other deplorable mutherfuckas)
I did not give him what he wanted. I did my job, realizing they are going to do what they want to do anyway.
BOTTOM LINE:
I'm calling it unproven from an unreliable source, Barack Obama and the US Media.
Before I start with the substance of the story, consider this background. First, if Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.
The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad.
This story came 24 days after the White House released an anonymous statement asserting, among other things, “the Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day,” suggesting that the Russians may have been deterred.
This story was leaked within hours of the time the White House announced it was calling for an all-intelligence community review of the Russia intelligence, offered without much detail. Indeed, this story was leaked and published as an update to that story.
Which is to say, the CIA and/or people in Congress (this story seems primarily to come from Democratic Senators) leaked this, apparently in response to President Obama’s not terribly urgent call to have all intelligence agencies weigh in on the subject of Russian influence, after weeks of Democrats pressuring him to release more information. It was designed to both make the White House-ordered review more urgent and influence the outcome.
So here’s what that story says.
In September, the spooks briefed “congressional leaders” (which for a variety of reasons I wildarseguess is either a Gang of Four briefing including Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Harry Reid or a briefing to SSCI plus McConnell, Reid, Jack Reed, and John McCain). Apparently, the substance of the briefing was that Russia’s intent in hacking Democratic entities was not to increase distrust of institutions, but instead to elect Trump.
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The difference between this story and other public assessments is that it seems to identify the people — who sound like people with ties to the Russian government but not necessarily part of it — who funneled documents from Russia’s GRU to Wikileaks.
Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.
[snip]
[I]ntelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees.
This is the part that has always been missing in the past: how the documents got from GRU, which hacked the DNC and John Podesta, to Wikileaks, which released them. It appears that CIA now thinks they know the answer: some people one step removed from the Russian government, funneling the documents from GRU hackers (presumably) to Wikileaks to be leaked, with the intent of electing Trump.
Not everyone buys this story. Mitch McConnell doesn’t buy the intelligence.
In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.
That’s one doubt raised about CIA’s claim — though like you all, I assume Mitch McConnell shouldn’t be trusted on this front.
But McConnell wasn’t the only one. One source for this story — which sounds like someone like Harry Reid or Dianne Feinstein — claimed that this CIA judgment is the “consensus” view of all the intelligence agencies, a term of art.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
Except that in a briefing this week (which may have been what impressed John McCain and Lindsey Graham to do their own investigation), that’s not what this represented.
The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered. [my emphasis]
That’s a conflict. Some senior US official (often code for senior member of Congress) says this is the consensus view. Another senior US official (or maybe the very same one) says there are “minor disagreements.”
Remember: we went to war against Iraq, which turned out to have no WMD, in part because no one read the “minor disagreements” from a few agencies about some aluminum tubes. A number of Senators who didn’t read that footnote closely (and at least one that did) are involved in this story. What we’re being told is there are some aluminum tube type disagreements.
Let’s hear about those disagreements this time, shall we?
Here’s the big takeaway. The language “a formal US assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies” is, like “a consensus view,” a term of art. It’s an opportunity for agencies which may have differing theories of what happened here to submit their footnotes.
That may be what Obama called for today: the formal assessment from all agencies (though admittedly, the White House purposely left the scope and intent of it vague).
Whatever that review is intended to be, what happened as soon as Obama announced it is that the CIA and/or Democratic Senators started leaking their conclusion. That’s what this story is.
Update: One other really critical detail. When the White House announced the Obama review today, Wikileaks made what was a bizarre statement. Linking to a CNN story on the Obama ordered review that erred on the side of blaming Russia for everything, it said, “CNN: Obama orders report into WikiLeaks timed for release just prior to Trump presidency.” Even though none of the statements on the review focused on what this story does — that is, on the way that the DNC and Podesta emails got to Wikileaks — Wikileaks nevertheless interpreted it as an inquiry targeted at it.
Update: And now David Sanger (whose story on the Obama-ordered review was particularly bad) and Scott Shane reveal the RNC also got hacked, and it is the differential leaking that leads the spooks to believe the Russians wanted Trump to win.
They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public.
This may be a fair assessment. But you would have to account for two things before making it. First, you’d need to know the timing and hacker behind the RNC hack. That’s because two entities are believed to have hacked the DNC: an FSB appearing hacking group, and a GRU one. The FSB is not believed to have leaked. GRU is believed to have. So if the FSB hacked the RNC but didn’t leak it, it would be completely consistent with what FSB did with DNC.
NYT now says the RNC hack was by GRU in the spring, so it is a fair question why the DNC things got leaked but RNC did not.
Also, Sanger and Shane say “largely documents” from Dems were leaked. That’s false. There were two streams of non-Wikileaks releases, Guccifer, which did leak all-Dem stuff, and DC Leaks, which leaked stuff that might be better qualified as Ukrainian related. The most publicized of documents from the latter were from Colin Powell, which didn’t help Trump at all.
Update: It’s clear that Harry Reid (who of course is retiring and so can leak speech and debate protected classified information without worrying he’ll be shut off in the future) is one key driver of this story. Last night he was saying, “”I was right. Comey was wrong. I hope he can look in the mirror and see what he did to this country.” This morning he is on the TV saying he believes Comey had information on this before the election.
-------------------------
UPDATE ON FBI SHENANIGANS:
FBI sent planeload of agents to frame Assange in Iceland, got snubbed by minister
The US sent a “planeload of FBI agents” to Iceland in 2011 to frame WikiLeaks and its co-founder Julian Assange, according to a former Icelandic minister of interior, who refused them any cooperation and asked them to cease their activities.
In June 2011, Obama administration implied to Iceland's authorities they had knowledge of hackers wanting to destroy software systems in the country, and offered help, then-Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson, said in an interview with the Katoikos publication.
However, Jonasson said he instantly became “suspicious” of the US good intentions, “well aware that a helping hand might easily become a manipulating hand.”
Later in the summer 2011, the US “sent a planeload of FBI agents to Iceland seeking our cooperation in what I understood as an operation set up to frame Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,” Jonasson said.
Icelanders seemed like a tough nut to crack, though.
“Since they had not been authorized by the Icelandic authorities to carry out police work in Iceland and since a crack-down on WikiLeaks was not on my agenda, to say the least, I ordered that all cooperation with them be promptly terminated and I also made it clear that they should cease all activities in Iceland immediately,” the politician said.
So the US were told to leave, and moreover, the politician made things quite clear for them.
“If I had to take sides with either WikiLeaks or the FBI or CIA, I would have no difficulty in choosing: I would be on the side of WikiLeaks,” he said.
Jónasson went on to discuss other whistleblowers like Edward Snowden: the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, debated whether Snowden should have been granted citizenship, but “there hasn't been political consensus” on the matter.
“Iceland is part of NATO and such a decision would be strongly objected to by the US,” Jonasson said.
Both whistleblowers have spent several years under protection: Assange has been staying in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for about four years, while Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013, and he is still staying at an undisclosed location there.
The current argument being made by the media to discredit what has been revealed about the Clinton campaign cannot be disputed by the facts. The facts are obviously true. Any rational reading of the actual emails attests to their being genuine and authenticity.
The proof of that is the intensity of the argument to discredit the source.
It is claimed that the source, Russian, therefore Putin, makes them inadmissible evidence of Clintonian chicanery.
There is a full press nuclear strength info solar flair war in process this morning. Every big media news source is running with it.
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S.
Just before Donald Trump takes the presidential oath of office next month, the Obama administration plans to release a full report on Russian connections to cyber attacks during the election, officials said Friday.
Trump has cast doubt on the Kremlin's involvement in politically charged hacking and fake news efforts prior to this year’s election while leading members of Congress have called on the administration to share what it knows about the Russian connection and pushed for a wider investigation, leading to a potentially fiery showdown over the issue. And such a public divide between the president-elect and intelligence agencies is unusual and dangerous, say experts.
"To evaluate Congress’s response appropriately, we would like all Members to have a comprehensive understanding of what the U.S. Intelligence Community knows regarding Russia’s involvement in these actions and attempts to interfere in our election," the lawmakers wrote this week in an open letter to President Barack Obama.
Officials sometimes purposely share with Congress "only what is necessary for them to perform proper oversight," partially as a safeguard against unintentional leaks, says Chris Finan, a former White House cybersecurity advisor and CEO of Bay Area security startup Manifold Technology. But in this case, Finan says it was more likely that intelligence agencies are still working to establish precisely how various efforts to influence the election link back to the top levels of the Russian government.
"They’d want to try to find deliberate command and control links—instances where people were directed by a Russian official," he says. "I think that there’s probably a lot of interest and focus in, are these proxy groups operating on their own based on what they thought Moscow would want them to do or were they acting on a directive from somebody in the Russian government."
Prominent Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced a bill on Wednesday calling for a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian attempts to influence the election. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings cited October statements from intelligence officials blaming Russia for hacks targeting Democratic Party servers and subsequent leaks of embarrassing emails.
"The head of the National Security Agency said there is no doubt that this was a targeted and conscious effort to achieve a specific result," Cummings said in a statement. "And the Intelligence Community also said that they believe that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Prominent Republican senators including Arizona Senator and Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina, and Tennessee Senator and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker have also all expressed interest in investigating Russian hacks, despite the president-elect's skepticism. House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas,has also recently publicly condemned Russia for the attacks despite his support for Trump.
Trump said in an interview with Time magazine, which named him 2016’s "Person of the Year," that he doesn’t believe Russia interfered with the election and thinks intelligence agency conclusions may have been politically motivated.
Trump’s statements drew a strong rebuke from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, who called his comments "enormously damaging to the country" and to intelligence officials.
"Notwithstanding the abundance of evidence that Russia hacked our political institutions during the Presidential campaign and dumped documents in an effort to meddle in our political affairs, President-elect Trump’s comments this morning continue to contradict our intelligence professionals and carry water for the Kremlin," Schiff said in a statement.
Schiff declined through a spokesman to comment further on the matter, and a Trump spokeswoman didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Such a divide over the legitimacy of intelligence reports is highly unusual, particularly when conclusions within the intelligence community seem so unanimous, Finan says.
"Not only is it unusual—it’s incredibly dangerous," he says. "To question the veracity but also to question the professionalism of our intelligence community, that is potentially very damaging to morale and it’s going to put the nation at risk."
_______
ELEPHANT BAR OPINION:
No argument is being made against the veracity of the emails. Only the source.
I for one, hardly no where to turn for so-called information or news that does not have a political agenda behind it. In general the US British and European media has amazingly, so tarted up their profession and the professionalism of journalism, I would give more credence to a $100 hooker in the Hotel del Rey's Sportsman's Bar than the whores in the media.
This is getting dangerous and will get real ugly and get ugly fast.
ON ANOTHER MATTER
To be honest with all of you. I am not sure we are doing much more than pissing in the wind. Google is making it very difficult to use blogger as it was intended.
I assumed that it was to freely express my views and all others to express theirs as well. Google has so expanded their voracious appetite to control everyone and all their information all the time, I spend an inordinate amount of time signing in and trying to dodge their pernicious appetite to know us. Trust me. It is worse than you think.
I refuse to give them a working cell phone number and by doing so, I can edit the blog, but not comment on it. I made the unfortunate error of signing into Google Drive and it has made things worse.
I don't have the time or the inclination to move to another platform as everyone else has.
I'll make one phone call to them to try and get this straightened out.
